To be perfectly frank—to speak with extreme candor—I have a hard time following almost anything that tumbles out of Andy Caldwell’s mouth. But then again, perhaps that’s because his thoughts are just too big for my simple canary capacity.
Or maybe, it’s because this particular candidate for the 24th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is long-winded and doesn’t make any sense. But what do I know? I’m only a bird.
It’s “heady stuff,” to use his own descriptor from a speech he gave to what he called “the best Republican club in the whole entire region.” And no, that club wasn’t in Santa Barbara County. That club exists in Atascadero, where the Republican Party of San Luis Obispo County’s headquarters are.
The term “best” is a bit of a reach. Unless of course you are a Trump-lover who clings to family, faith, and country and believes that the disintegration of the nuclear family led to the disintegration of our inner cities, which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and is destroying America because socialists, anarchists, and globalists have formed an unholy alliance with China and George Soros. Are you following me?
No? Good. I lost myself at, “Unless of course … .”
“Empires come and go,” he told this particular group of Republicans in July. “What we are seeing right now could be nothing else than the end of the American empire.”
And guess what? “It’s been happening since the 1960s.” He’s been holding on to all of this angst since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed!
This is America! Where we discriminate against everyone who isn’t like us! We can’t outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin simply because people were protesting about it. Protesters ruined this country! Bunch of goddamn liberal progressives whining about civil rights!
People just need to stick to faith, family, and country so the Empire can Strike Back. He repeated the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” without actually making a cohesive point. But he never actually said the second part of that statement in the Declaration of Independence. You know the one: “ … that all men are created equal.”
Yes. I should have known better than to travel down Caldwell’s little rabbit hole of propaganda on YouTube. But it’s because a “sponsored” piece of “heady” propaganda popped up on my Facebook feed. Yeah. I clicked!
He trotted out the old frog and the scorpion fairy tale. Today’s “woke progressives” are the scorpion in the story “who literally stung the minds of young people raging against America,” he said. So, that I can follow—except really, guys like Caldwell and his guy in the White House, Donald “the divider in chief” Trump, are a more adequate analogy for that stinging scorpion. We’re all going to drown if this keeps up.
What I didn’t understand was the disintegration of Caldwell’s message, when he started rambling about how we would all drown because of “secular humanism,” which is what progressives have been “inculcating” us with. Jesus Christ. What?
“This is not a political battle,” he whined at his fellow Republicans in Atascadero. “It is an existential crisis.”
The canary thinks Andy Caldwell is an existential crisis. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 3-10, 2020.